Egypt to move national archives online following ICANN decision on domain names

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' recent decision to open the internet's top-level domains to non-English languages has paved the way for Egypt to move its national archives on to the web.

Reuters reports that the Egyptian minister for communications and information technology, Tarek Kamel, has said that the changes at the national archives and the recent registration of the web's first Arabic domain name are part of an effort to extend web access to more Arabic speakers. Reuters also says that Arabic content accounts for only 1 percent of all web content, according to analysts.

Although the deals to put both the first Egyptian domain and the Egyptian national archives online have been finalised, the sites won't go live until early next year. TMC reports that IBM is assisting the Egyptian government with the process, which involves more than 90 million documents in 25 million separate records.

The project is similar to that being undertaken by Google, which is attempting to digitize much of the world's knowledge and make it freely available online. That project has faced several legal challenges from publishers, however.